Building work in Woolwich: area guide

This is our area guide to building work in Woolwich (SE18, Greenwich): the housing, the council rules that apply (the Royal Borough of Greenwich for planning) and every service we offer here. For whole-house refurbishment go to Home renovation in Woolwich.

Three quarters of Woolwich's homes were built after 1945, from council estates to the new blocks by the river, and most are flats, on VOA figures. The older town divides cleanly between two kinds of building. Up the hill from the town centre run streets of Victorian terraces with solid nine inch walls, bay fronts, closet wings and suspended timber floors, most well past a hundred years old. Down by the river, the Royal Arsenal's conversion has produced apartments in restored historic buildings and new construction. The same request, a better kitchen and a more open ground floor, means completely different work depending on which side of General Gordon Square you live.

Around 21,990 homes make up Woolwich on the valuation list; 74% are flats and 26% houses, and 24% date from before 1919, 2% from between the wars and 75% from after 1945. VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for all 6 statistical areas in Woolwich. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Arsenal apartments and managed buildings: consent before layout

An apartment at the Royal Arsenal is a different job in every respect. The building is managed, the flat is leasehold, and structural or layout changes need the freeholder's written consent before the design is finalised. Construction is typically concrete or steel frame with non structural partitions, so opening up is usually an open-plan conversion job, but what looks like a stud wall may conceal a column, a riser or part of a structural core. The building's own drawings and the management rules are consulted before anything is cut, because cutting first and asking afterwards is not an option in a frame building.

Management rules govern the rest. Working hours, lift bookings, loading bay access, dust containment and where waste can be staged are set by the building rather than by the site, and corridors and lifts are protected before the first delivery. We supply the insurance details and method statement the management company asks for, and one person deals with them so you are not doing it from your desk. It adds lead time, not difficulty: booking the lift and the loading bay weeks ahead is part of the programme rather than an afterthought.

Victorian terraces above the town centre: side return, spine wall, party wall

A terrace of this era has a predictable anatomy and predictable faults. The rear closet wing leaves a narrow side return that most owners eventually want filled in as a house extension. Solid brick walls have no cavity, so they lose heat and can carry damp inward where ground levels have risen against them. Suspended timber ground floors need their underfloor ventilation kept clear, and it rarely is. Lath and plaster ceilings crack and get overboarded rather than replaced. The survey should surface all of it, not the second week of the build.

Opening the ground floor up is the change these houses most need, and it is a load-bearing wall removal job. The wall between front and rear rooms carries floor loads and often part of a chimney stack, so an engineer we bring in assesses the load path, and the beam and padstones come from their calculations. Our part is installation: propping, staged demolition, seating the steel and leaving the bearings open for building control. Where a bearing lands in the shared wall, it is notifiable under the Party Wall Act and notice must reach the neighbour first.

Patchwork SE18 houses: when single room jobs become one sequence

Most Victorian houses in SE18 have been improved in patches over decades, which leaves an odd mixture: a new bathroom, original wiring, a rewire that stopped at the first floor, a boiler squeezed into what used to be an airing cupboard. That is why a kitchen renovation or bathroom renovation here often becomes a home renovation, bringing the building to one standard in one sequence. Structure, then first fix electrics and plumbing, then plaster, then kitchen, bathroom, second fix and decoration, with inspections at each stage rather than all at the end. Following that order stops one trade undoing another's work.

Living arrangements have to be decided honestly too. Work on that scale in an occupied terrace can be phased, but it is slower and dustier than moving out for the noisy stage, and we say which yours needs at quotation stage rather than in week three. Waste, deliveries and a skip permit all have to be arranged around a street with controlled parking and no rear access to most of these terraces, and that gets planned before a start date is confirmed. Certainty about those arrangements is worth more to most households than an optimistic start date.

Where to go next for work in Woolwich: kitchen renovation in Woolwich, house extensions in Woolwich, the Greenwich area guide, building work in Charlton, building work in Welling and Staircase Renovation Cost.